Brower
Pulls the Plug. David Brower led the Sierra Club fight against
the Echo Park Dam and reservoir in Dinosaur National Monument.
Though he won that battle, he was remorseful later when Glen
Canyon Dam was constructed. He reminisced, "Glen Canyon died
in 1963 and I was partly responsible for its needless death.
So were you. Neither you nor I, nor anyone else, knew it well
enough to insist that at all costs it should endure."Photograph
by Dugald Bremner. Courtesy of Glen Canyon Institute.
In
1956 the Colorado River Storage Project Act authorized a number
of new dams on the Colorado River and tributaries in the Upper
Basin. One of the first successful efforts of what we now call
environmental opposition halted construction of one of those
dams, the proposed Echo Park Dam in Dinosaur National
Monument.
The
site selected for the largest reservoir would have flooded a
national monument, and after a series of decisions about the
need for water storage in the Upper Basin to deliver water to
the Lower Basin, Glen Canyon Dam was authorized
in place of Echo Park Dam. Now a series of towns are dependent
upon the dam and the lake.
The
quotes and documentation on this panel tell something of the
story and something of the choices we face in the continuing
debate over human intervention in the river’s flow.
Would
we build Glen Canyon Dam today?
A
poster courtesy of Glen Canyon Institute and billboard courtesy
of Friends of Lake Powell, Inc. demonstrate the difference of
opinion concerning the future of the Glen Canyon Dam and Lake
Powell.
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"The
Park Service estimated in 1963 when we closed the gates to create
the lake that perhaps 600,000 people a year might be using it by
the year 2000.I predicted three million by the year 1990 and I was
right. It attracts three million visitors a year. So the economic
impact, just for tourism alone, would justify building Glen Canyon
Dam. Now they talk about draining it. That would be a monument to
stupidity to drain Glen Canyon Dam."
Floyd
Dominy, interviewed for Moving Waters radio documentary, August
2001
The
Place No One Knew by Eliot Porter, edited
by David Brower, published by the Sierra Club, 1963. David Brower
did not know Glen Canyon until the dam was under construction. He
then teamed Elliot Porterís photographs with eloquent writings by
wilderness advocates to mourn the loss of the canyon.
"Once
it was different there. I know, for I was one of the lucky few (there
could have been thousands more) who saw Glen Canyon before it was
drowned. In fact I saw only a part of it but enough to realize that
here was an Eden, a portion of the earthís original paradise. To
grasp the nature of the crime that was committed imagine the Taj
Mahal or Chartres Cathedral buried in mud until only the spires
remain visible. With this difference: those man-made celebrations
of human aspiration could conceivably be reconstructed while Glen
Canyon was a living thing, irreplaceable, which can never be recovered
through any human agency."
Ed
Abbey, Down the River with Henry Thoreau, 1981
A
poster courtesy of Glen Canyon Institute and billboard courtesy
of Friends of Lake Powell, Inc. demonstrate the difference of opinion
concerning the future of the Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell.
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